Re: fixing a debian system: which RTFM to start?
Hello,
On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim wrote:
> Hello:
>
> I am a lay debian user with minimum operating experience.
> Would someone please inform me, which manual to read for
> fixing a REMOTE debian system (i.e. ca. 10000 miles from my
> place)?
>
> First the good news:
> - I can reboot the system (and login again into it)
> - It is not a production system (so no worries for ruin it)
>
Thats good. From here on you can work like it is your local system. Just
log in a couple of times so you have a lot of terminals. In one termial
you can dump your syslog (tail -f /var/log/syslog), in another you can
edit a config file, while in a third you can start the program. There is
really nothing special about a remote computer now.
> The Bad News is:
> - many anomalies occurs, e.g. the "named" sometimes dies.
Add these lines in sources.list:
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ potato/updates main contrib
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-non-US/ potato/non-US main contrib
I had named dying before, it was a cache bug or something.
> - not much information is available about the history of
> the system.
Checked all the logs?
> - When I try to "update" (in dselect) it complains that
> "mount: the kernel does not recognize /dev/hda as a
> block device"
> despite there are only /dev/sda, /dev/hdb, and /dev/hdc
> on the system.
>
I do not use dselect, but it seems like you have to visit /etc/fstab to
see if you have /dev/hda somewhere. Another possibility is that that is
your old cdrom place. Check 'ls -l /dev/cdrom' and see where it points to.
If you have in your sources list a cdrom line, it tries to mount it, I
think.
> The current kernel is 2.4.6 and /etc/apt/sources.list
> points to woody (with commented potato).
>
Uncomment potato. It does not hurd. AFAIK woody still does not contain all
potato packages.
> May I know, what RTFM to start?
>
> regards,
>
Greetz,
Sebastiaan
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